First post, by Zaza le Nounours
Hello everyone.
I recently pulled the trigger and built a Win98 PC build. I decided to go for a P3-s 1.4 GHz on an Asus TUSL2-C motherboard, a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 AGP, and 512 MB of RAM. The build was a bit of a pain, because I forgot how clunky building a computer was 20 years ago (did you know that a simple thing like having a USB stick detected by Windows implied having to install some random generic USB mass storage driver in the first place ? Those were dark times for sure), but finally everything seems to be working fine now.
Except, I find the performance of the computer to be a bit... underwhelming ? I didn't get the opportunity the test a lot of games so far, and for example Half-Life and Need for Speed 3 both run just fine, even with anti-aliasing activated in the Nvidia drivers, but on the other hand in Max Payne 2 (released in late 2003) framerate is all over the place, and can drop as low as 20-something FPS, even with everything set to low and at a resolution of 640*480. NOLF2, released in 2002, also runs like shit.
Benchmarks also seem a bit disappointing : I get ~9800 in 3Dmark 2000 and ~8500 in 3Dmark 2001.
So, I don't know, were my expectations for this build too high ? Is my CPU bottlenecking my GPU, or the other way around ? Or do you think there might be something wrong with my build, that could explain these relatively poor performances ?